Contents

Synopsis

The setup of the show was that Gloria had been left at loose ends after her husband, Michael Stivic (who did not appear in the new series), left her and moved away to a commune. Gloria, to be closer to her father, decided to move with her young son, Joey (played by Christian Jacobs), and pick up the pieces of her life as an assistant to two veterinarians in Fox Ridge, New York. The veterinarians were played by Burgess Meredith and Jo De Winter; the character played by Meredith was also, conveniently, Gloria's landlord.

Though Gloria ranked 18th in the Nielsen ratings for the 1982–83 season and scored a 18.7 rating tying it with Trapper John, M.D., CBS chose not to renew it for a second season, making it one of the few spin-offs of the successful All in the Family not to have a successful run.

The unaired pilot

CBS rejected Gloria's original pilot which featured a brief cameo by Carroll O'Connor as Archie Bunker dropping off Gloria and Joey at Dr. Adams' clinic and residence. It was repackaged as an episode of Archie Bunker's Place. This pilot was written by veteran All in the Family and Archie Bunker's Place writers Pat Shea and Harriett Weiss and Archie Bunker's Place producer and close Carroll O'Connor associate Joe Gannon who co-created, wrote and produced the pilot. They were replaced by former WKRP in Cincinnati writers Steve Marshall and Dan Guntzelman (who would later find success writing and producing the long running ABC-TV sitcom Growing Pains).

The show's production was moved from CBS Television City to Universal Studios. According to a December 1982 feature interview with Sally Struthers in TV Guide this did not sit well with Carroll O'Connor who, with the rest of the Archie Bunker's Place production staff, were effectively shut out of the production of Gloria. (Even Norman Lear, who created All in the Family and had some hand in all of its other spin-offs, had no credited involvement in Gloria.) After this, O'Connor chose to be uninvolved in the retooled pilot and series. The characters of Dr. Jim Waynewrite and Ben the handyman were dropped when Marshall and Guntzelman's second pilot was made which went to series. In the second pilot, Joey adopted a black dog which he named Archie after his grandfather, which O'Connor was said to be less than thrilled about according to the same 1982 TV Guide article. In the original pilot, actress Jo de Winter's character, Maggie Lawrence, was an assistant to Dr. Adams. In the second pilot and the series, Maggie Lawrence is a veterinarian and Dr. Adams' partner in the clinic.